Category: Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies

If you know me, there is a good chance that you know how 👍 I am about Blockchain and Decentralized apps. I have given a few talks on it but till recently these were mostly either focused on Bitcoin or on the academics of Blockchain technology. At a recent Comcast Labweek, I was finally able to get my hands dirty with building a Blockchain based decentralized app (DApp) on Ethereum.

Labweek is a week long hackathon at the T&P org in Comcast that lets people work on pretty much anything. I was pretty fortunate to end up working with a bunch of really smart engineers here. The problem we decided to look into was the challenge of funding open source projects. I am pretty passionate about open source technologies but I have seen great ideas die on Github because supporting a project when you aren’t getting paid for it is really hard. Our solution to this problem was a bounty system for Github issues that we called CodeCoin.

The way CodeCoin worked was as follows:

A project using CodeCoin would sign up on our site and download some Git hooks.

When anyone creates an issue on Github, we create an Ethereum wallet for the issue and post the wallet address back to Github so its the first comment on the issue.

We use a Chrome extension that adds a “Fund this issue” button on the Github page that starts the Ethereum payment flow.

To actually handle the payment, we require MetaMask that we can trigger using its JavaScript api

Ether is held in the wallet till the issue is marked resolved and merged into master. At this time another Git hook fires that tells our server to release the Ether into the wallets of all the developers who worked on the issue.

Issue page design. Most of the UI changes came from a custom Chrome extensionApplication Flow

Note that while we held the Ether on our side in wallets, the right way to do this would have been to use a Smart Contract. We started down that route but since most of the code was done in like 2 days (while juggling other real projects), wallets seemed like the easier route.

Releasing money into developer accounts was also a hack. Since developers don’t sign up to Github with any digital wallet address, we need the wallet addresses as part of the final commit message. This could be done with a lookup on a service like Keybase.IO maybe and with more time we would have tried integrating it to our prototype. In fact it was the next week that I heard about their own Git offering. I haven’t read enough about that yet though.

Development notes:

For local development, we used the TestRPC library to run a Ethereum chain simulation on our machine.

We used web3js, the Ethereum JavaScript api for doing most of the actual transactions

Web3js was injected into the browser by the MetaMask extension. There were some challenges getting Metamask to talk to the TestRPC. Basically, you had to make sure that you initialized MetaMask with the same seed words as you used for your account on TestRPC (which makes sense) but there isn’t a way afaik to change that information in MetaMask. Early on, we were restarting TestRPC without configuring the initial accounts so we’d have to reinstall MetaMask to configure it with the new account. Chalk that to our own unfamiliarity with the whole setup.

MetaMask transaction

We did try to use Solidity to run a smart contract on TestRPC which worked for the demo apps, but canned that effort in the last moment as we were running out of time

All in all, it was a fun couple of days of intense coding and I feel I learnt a lot. Most of all I enjoyed working with a group of really smart peers, most of whom I didn’t know before the project at all. Hopefully we get to do more of that in the future 🙂

Every couple of months I meet a few friends over lunch to geek out over the latest in the world of Bitcoin, Blockchains and Crypocurrencies in general. Just so that I dont forget them, here is a list of things we discussed today 🙂